I'm not set-up to work from home :-\ Usually just bring my laptop home, but didn't think a little rain on Wednesday evening was going to be any big deal, so left it at work. I'm pretty lucky though, a lot of people are having a really tough time.

I work in Boulder, but the Sheriff's office said that everyone should stay home today. A lot of the roads are perfectly fine, but empty because everyone is staying home. A few spots are really flooded and impassable though. As far as I know, my office isn't flooded, but we did put all our computers on our desks as a precaution. I'm sort of nervous because I forgot to push my code before I left, so I might have to redo some work if something happens to my computer.

The Media Source API that Netflix is helping to push also provides a lot of really useful features for non-drm video in the web browser as well. Providing a simple way to download chunks of video and seamlessly insert them into a container through javascript will prove really useful for javascript web applications. Even some of the encrypted stuff will be great for things like sharing personal videos with only a few friends.

As a web developer interested in new ways to provide video, the Media Source stuff would immediately be really useful to me, and I'm sure many other people who won't even touch the DRM part. Don't let one company sour the whole proposal.

A little harsh, but thanks for bring up ROE. Saying drones are bad is not the same as saying war is bad. The latter is a conversation worth having, but saying drones are bad is just stifling scientific progress. Not all unmanned aerial vehicles kill people, and there is a massive potential to use UAVs not just for surveillance, but for mapping of dangerous terrain, transport of goods, and whatever else you can think of to get something somewhere without a human being there.

If you want to put a LIDAR on a drone to 3D map a riverbed, it's basically impossible right now with current US laws, and all this "drones are gonna kill you" talk is just making it that much more difficult for real engineers to get working, non-military, society-enhancing things out in the world.

Losing communication to a ground station is one of the first things that proper drones already account for. At the simplest, they'll hover in place until they run out of fuel, and slowly land before that even happens. More advanced ones will remember where the base station is and attempt to return to it to get communication back, continue on preset courses or whatever else to safely continue on. Of course there will be hardware or software problems just like there are with airplanes, cars, whatever, but there a lot of really smart people out there figuring this stuff out right now, and they're aware of all these possible issues.

Swatch Internet Time is truly the savior to all of this trouble. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

The whole time zone thing is just ridiculous in this age of information. When I'm too busy cruising the information super highway, I don't want to worry about whether the person I'm on IRC with is in London or Sydney. And for that matter, seconds? minutes? Relics of the past. Just divide the day into 1,000 beats and you're good to go.

So what if no one has any sense of what 10 beats is (14 minutes 4 seconds), and so what if it was created by a watch maker probably to sell more watches. Swatch Internet Time is the wave of the future, man! Throw your grandfather clocks away and dial-up to greatness on your 56k. You don't want to be left behind in the Swatch revolution!

Sure, cloud gaming can work. Despite what people may say, OnLive works, and some people have a good time playing on it, but those people are knowingly making a sacrifice to play their game on OnLive. Cloud gaming will be fine, but even the tiniest lag is a step backwards. It's adding one more thing on top of all the other things that cause lag, and cause a game to feel bad.

Call of Duty has some of the fastest response times for any game -- that means when you pull the trigger, it feels like you instantly hear the gunshot and see the muzzleflash. Not everyone can pinpoint why a game like Call of Duty "feels" better, but it's in large part to that minimum delay, and I have no doubt that it played a not insignificant role in the success of that particular franchise.

Adding a trip across the country through your ISP is a step backwards, and it's a trade off that some people may accept -- and that's fine, hardware can be expensive after all -- but it's not a trade off that I want to see.

I'm in exactly this situation right now. I was trained in Adobe Creative Suite at my old job, and started a new job this week at a ~8 person company that has no licenses for expensive software like this. I've been worrying about asking them to spend so much on a license just so I can be comfortable, but if this pans out, I'll be able to use an old version until I can justify to the new company that we should spend the money on the latest version.

I'm still going to hold off until I'm sure it's legal to use it, but here's hoping.

I was trying to root an old android device and put a custom ROM on it, and guess what? Most of the files were hosted on megaupload. I ended up spending more time looking for the files hosted on other sites than I spent actually messing with rooting.

I don't expect the kind, awesome people who created the rooting tools to check on stuff they uploaded 3 years ago and make sure links aren't broken; it would be nice if there was at least one place where you could safely store public files that won't be shut down. It's just like that older xkcd comic, with as awesome as the internet is, just transferring files around is still so frustratingly difficult sometimes.

This happened in Counter-Strike 1.x back in the day. Some people may hate me for admitting this, but I used to cheat in Counter-Strike and started scripting my own aimbots using some of the cheating software packages that were available back then. The reason I got so into it and started getting into the scripting was because I found a server that specifically allowed and encouraged hackers to join.

It was like playing a completely different game. A lot of people were using the same packages of cheats that I was using, so it became a game of tweaking tiny variables here and there to make sure that your first shot always hit the head. Then once you set everything up, you had to learn the maps carefully, specifically knowing which walls were able to be shot through. While a lot of people just ran around and let the aimbots do all the work, the people who were winning were using wallhacks to see players through walls, and use a bound key to toggle the aimbot to shoot through walls (normally it'd only shoot players with direct line of sight).

Yeah, in the end there was little skill required to actually play the game, but the rewarding part came when you knew your aimbot was better than the other guy's because of the tweaks you made to it. I got out of it when Valve started implementing cross-server bans.

There's another video interview with John Carmack about the headset over at giantbomb.com, and doesn't have some of the terrible background noise: http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-john-carmack-interview/17-6164/

He really goes into detail about why he was disappointed with previous headsets, and how he went about making his own and optimizing refresh rates and such.

I wouldn't be so quick to lump them into "professional" drivers -- anyone with enough practice can learn how to threshold brake. The more in-depth driving courses force students to practice it quite a few times so that hopefully it becomes second nature and you don't have to be in the right state of mind, you just do it naturally.

What always gets me is how little people seem to know about anti-lock braking, and specifically, how you should be braking. People should be practicing what instructors now call "threshold braking," where you find the point at where your wheels just start slipping and keep it around there. People should _not_ rely on ABS and simply slam on the brakes as hard as they can.

If you imagine a graph of the velocity of wheel rotation:
- Slamming on brakes without ABS makes graph stay at 0, meaning your car is sliding (not ideal obviously).
- If you slam on the brakes with ABS, the graph skips between spinning and flat, each spinning point getting slower until you stop. Every time it catches you sliding, it'll force the brakes off to make your tires roll again. This is better, because the brakes will catch more often, but it's still not the best.
- The threshold braking graph will be a downward pointing graph that goes from spinning to stopped without ever slipping.

Those with calculus backgrounds--the integral of the threshold braking graph will be smaller than that of ABS braking, meaning deceleration is quicker. It does take practice to learn how to tell when your car is slipping and letting off the brakes just a smidge until it's not, but it really is the better way to brake.

I took this as a sign to change all my passwords. It's been a pain in the ass honestly, and provided a nice overview of who is is good at letting you change passwords and who sucks. ICQ so far is by far the worst, you can't change it through their website, so you have to download their client, plus they don't allow special characters. Ebay's was really hard to find where to change it as well.

I just went through my bookmarks, starting with the imporant stuff and working my way down. Unfortunately, there are surely some sites i've forgotten. I'll have to change them as they come up, but are mostly throwaway accounts anyway.

I was about to post the same thing. I'm taking an online art class and the photograph is printed in the book, "Preble's Art Forms 9th Edition". I do find it fascinating how old news can suddenly jump into popularity all over the web.